Our Halloween Party

This past Saturday Mom-in-law and I threw a little family Halloween party. It was so much fun and turned out wonderfully! We started working on it pretty early so putting it all together wasn't too stressful. We sent out invites at the beginning of October that I designed. I "aged" the envelopes by sponging them down with worcestershire sauce, and did wax seals on them. Fancy, I know. We hand delivered them because wax seals can't survive the mail system these days.





I bought this rug for the doorstep at the Smiths Marketplace for only $3.50, love it!


And as I've posted before, I bought all the below items, 50% off, spending $12 total.


I printed the below photo of my Great Great Grandpa Adolf Schmidt and bought the frame from IKEA for $29.95


The bats were a Pinterest inspiration. They took a while to cut out, but for being so cheap and easy, they look amazing. A definite must for all future Halloweens.

Mom made the black pumpkin pictured above. As well as the blow pumpkins  The black one above took a while with the bedazzling, but all the other ones were pretty easy.


We had lots of food! We started with Zuppa Toscana Soup, served in heated pumpkins. We were a little worried the soup would have a pumpkin taste to it, everyone said it wouldn't, and it didn't! All you have to do is carve out the pumpkins then bake them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until the inside of the pumpkin is tender.

Mom hit up a pumpkin patch in Lehi the day after Halloween and got all of the pumpkins completely for free. Word to the wise, if you are throwing a Halloween party, throw it just a couple days afterwards and you will save tons of money!


Mom made two types of spaghetti and we ordered alfredo and bread sticks from Olive Garden. We also served a salad, with Olive Garden dressing.

This picture doesn't really do the room justice, you really had to have been there! Mom did most of the decorating on her own, I just helped set up the lights.


There were name tags for everyone there and we played the name game... I really don't know what the game is called, but normally you would tape a name or character to your forehead, so you can't see it, and ask yes or no questions to the people around you to try and guess what you are. Rather than taping the characters to our foreheads, we just put them on the inside of each name card. Great ice breaker! Dave was Frankenweenie and I was a Poison Apple.






I put myself in charge of most of the desserts. I made whoopie pies, with orange frosting, a pumpkin chocolate chip bar, a lemon cake with buttercream frosting, and mom made chocolate dipped strawberries and a pecan pie. 


I am super proud of how my spider cake turned out. Mom was going to pay a friend to do it, but that didn't work out, so I took on the challenge. In the past, any time I try to make a layered cake they are very uneven layers. So I read up on tips for getting even layers. This blog was super helpful. I'll do a big blog post about must have tips soon! One layer was perfect, the other layer was terrible. So I bought a wire cake cutter from Walmart to level it out. After that, it was perfect. 

My next worry was making the buttercream look more fondant like. Again, from this blog I took my tips. I bought an offset spatula, which was so wise. An absolute must. I did a thin crumb layer. Let it dry and added a second layer. 

We had a hard time finding the edible glitter, but I bought it last minute from Amazon. It came in the mail around 11:00, day of the party. I love Amazon's free two day shipping! I used a spray bottle to spray just a thin layer of water on the cake to help the glitter stick, and then used a pumpkin template for the spider. He's not perfect by any means, but I am pretty dang proud of how he turned out.   




I bought the plates and napkins from Target. Seriously so in love with them! 


After dinner, we spent the evening playing charades and a little Halloween Trivia that I put together.

The trivia was just taken from lots of Google searches for fun Halloween facts. I checked multiple sources for each question. Click here for the trivia Qs and As.

I made the below cupcakes as a party favor. The boxes were from Target, I don't remember how much they were but they were really cheap. I cut the black paper to fit accordingly to the box and cut slits to push the cupcakes into so they wouldn't slide around.

I pretty much came up with the recipe for these cupcakes on my own, they are coconut, vanilla cupcakes with a light almond flavor. I just used a vanilla cupcake mix and added 1 tsp of almond flavoring. I just used leftover buttercream from the spider cake, added 1/2 tsp of almond flavoring and about 1/4 cup of coconut. The coconut made it hard to pipe the frosting out, but they still tasted delicious. I easily ate 5 of them, maybe more.... Probably more.... And then I just sprinkled a little of the black edible glitter on them.


All in all it was really awesome! 

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